Labs are hands-on coding projects that you build along with Tonya as she explains the code, concepts, and thought processes behind it. You can use the labs to further your code knowledge or to use right in your projects. Each lab ties into the Docx to ensure you have the information you need.
Each lab is designed to further your understanding and mastery of code. You learn more about how to think about its construction, quality, maintainability, programmatic and logical thought, and problem-solving. While you may be building a specific thing, Tonya presents the why of it to make it adaptable far beyond that specific implementation, thereby giving you the means to make it your own, in any context.
We use the WordPress nonce value to secure our saving process and determine if we should continue or not. Let’s talk about the nonce field and validation check in this episode. Watch this episode! We use the WordPress generated nonce for the following reasons: Validate if our meta box is on this screen. Validate that our meta box is (for the most part) valid. Nonce is a technique to validate that we are receiving what we expect. Resources WordPress Nonce wp_verify_nonce
This episode is VERY important as you’ll learn how a form in the browser is processed back on the web server. The entire back-end interface on the edit post and page screens is an HTML form. The meta box you built earlier is a component of input fields within that form. When you click on Publish or Update, all of the content on the page is sent back to the web server and stored in the $_POST super global in PHP. Big points here for you to master: Saving a post, page, custom post type, etc. triggers a post back […]
When the screen in the back-end renders, WordPress calls our meta box callback, which we called render_meta_box. In your code, that function does the following tasks: Grabs the metadata out of the database. Does processing if you need it. Loads our view file, which gets rendered out to the browser. Make sure you do this episode with me, as I walk through the code, HTML, and thought processes. You’ll see how little code it takes to create the meta box’s HTML. Resources Variable scope when including files (such as the view file) wp_nonce_field get_post_meta
The first step is to register your new meta box with WordPress. You’ll need to register a callback to the action event admin_menu and then use the WordPress function add_meta_box. Let’s walk through the code, look at the function in WordPress core, and look at the HTML.
Let’s recap what a meta box is and why and when you should build a custom one. A meta box is a UI (user interface) component to allow interactivity with content but without the technical aspects. Think about that statement. A meta box makes it easy to interact with content by adding, editing, deleting, etc. WordPress comes with a built Custom Field meta box. That interface is fine for simple projects or your own stuff. But for clients, we want to make it easier, more intuitive, and less technical. A meta box lets us abstract away the complexity such as […]
Let’s get you ready to start this lab. I’ll walk through your setup. Use the same setup and sandbox you created in the Post Metadata Basics lab, including having Kint installed. You need to clone the starting plugin from GitHub. You will need Git installed on your machine in order to do this. Follow along with me in the video to clone it to your machine. Make sure the Meta Box Basics plugin is on the “master” branch by typing: git checkout master Then activate the plugin.
If you work with Genesis-powered themes, like I do, then you need to modify your strategy a bit for adding in a subtitle to a single post type. Let’s walk through it together as well as explore the Genesis codebase. Genesis builds the post’s title HTML structure in the lib/structure/post.php file in the function genesis_do_post_title(). This function is a registered callback to the event genesis_entry_header. Let’s look at this code and how it builds the post title’s HTML.
Up until now, you’ve been getting data out of the database. It’s time to update data in the database. You’ll learn about how to update custom fields in the wp_postmeta database table both by writing the native SQL and using update function from WordPress Core. First, let’s write the SQL to change the custom field’s value in the database. You’ll learn about the UPDATE keyword in SQL. Then let’s update the subtitle using update_post_meta(). When you run the following code, the subtitle changes and then renders out to the browser. You’ll look at the SQL queries WordPress generates via the […]
Let’s talk about post metadata. WordPress stores metadata for post’s content into its wp_postmeta database table. When you need a piece of metadata that does not already exists, then you create a new custom field. Therefore, a custom field is nothing more than a post metadata that you specify. That’s it. Hint: You’ll learn how WordPress optimizes SQL queries to speed up your webpage loading. In this episode, you’ll look at the sequence of the SQL queries that WordPress does when loading a page: grabs the post, then terms, and then all of the post metadata. The metadata is then […]
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